


Once upon a Legal Career (and other stories)

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2020-07-25 20:02:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20031538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: A collection of Fairy Tale reworkings, retellings, and other 'sorta inspired by fariy tales' pieces





	1. Once upon a legal career

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what made me think 'Fairy Lawyer!', but here we are

My brothers and sisters looked askance at me when I first said I wanted to be a lawyer. We were _fairies_. We became godmothers, or wise advisors, or lived as wild, fey spirits granting polite travellers blessings and punishing those who deserved it.

The fact that I had always demanded an exact list of the points for this distinction, and who had compiled it, and when, should probably have clued them in that I wasn't going to stick to type.

It just didn't make _sense_. Who decided who was good and who was bad? The fairy? What use was that! My aunt thought everyone should give her an apple, sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and curtsy whenever they met her. Any traveller who ventured near her patch of the woods without prior warning was in for a shock (or else shared her eccentric views on a day's hike).

Studying law was hard. Not just because of the subject - my love for the goal got me through the boring bits - but because it meant living in a human town. They did their best to be accommodating, but there's a lot of iron in any human town.

I made do. It was going to be worth it.

It was. My siblings still raise their eyebrows, but I know it was. With magical land laws, bargains and quests, sometimes you _really_ need someone to check things are running to the rules.

That's not the same as being nice, mind. If you go into my aunt's territory without offering her an apple and all that, she can turn you into any kind of tree she likes (it's usually an apple, unless she's feeling creative). But she has to keep clear sign boards up at regular intervals around the perimeter, and she isn't allowed to trick you by pretending to be someone else. There's plenty of people who would've been spending a few seasons as an apple tree who have me to thank for that.

It caused a bit of a family row, but what can you do? If she didn't want people to press charges she should have operated in good faith to begin with. I'd always said she was being unreasonable and it was only a matter of time. Not even I had realised that what I meant was "until I'm qualified".

It was a bit of a bad moment when my first client told me who I was pressing charges against, I'll admit. But I won the case, and my aunt has finally started speaking to me again since I helped my cousin out when some adventurer totally unreasonably raided her house for food in passing. I don't care if you're searching for your one true love, it's still breaking and entering, not to mention theft.

My reputation precedes me, these days. I get a lot of out of court settlements, because people have twigged that I don't take on a case unless I'm damn sure I'm going to win it and they want to cut their own legal fees.

Right now I'm dealing with a messy case. Well, magical bargains are _always _either very straightforward or very messy. Word to the wise, folks: don't promise your firstborn child as payment. If for some reason you do, be sure to fill the prospective other parent in BEFORE conception. If they're not aware of the bargain, they can (and often will) object.

In really messy cases, like this one, they've already made the same deal to someone else. Two magical contracts with the same price, demanding payment at the same time…whew, it's a tangle.

I think I've got it sussed, though. The two contractors are just going to have to have joint care of the child and deal with it. The two parents both want to sue each other, but I'm trying to convince them not to seeing as they're both pressing the exact same charge. If their cases went through, they'd overall have no net change - one would have to make a payout to the other, who would then have to make the same payment back again. What a waste of paperwork.

Besides, in seventeen years the kid might want to press charges for being used as bartering material, and they might be better off forming a united front in advance. Not sure if I'd take that case or not. People have been offering up that kind of exchange for a long time.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem right that a kid has to grow up with the consequence of that sort of deal hanging over them. Still, seventeen years is a long time, so no need to borrow work for myself.

There's plenty of it around already. More than enough. There's a lot of contracts with fine print and shady dealers, not to mention the complexities of land laws when the land can be sentiment when it chooses. Arguments over who's fence it is pale into nothing when you've got the ground itself complaining that it didn't agree to have a fence there in the first place, thank you oh so very much.

The earth tends to speak through what we'd call 'tremors', so it also often leads to the fence falling down as well. I'll leave it to you to imagine what happens with land inheritance. Wills in my part of the world tend to be very long and complex even by the standards of legal documents, because it isn't as simple as 'this goes to so-and-so'. The land itself has to agree, and offers its own terms.

One of my colleagues works exclusively as a lawyer for the earth, arguing developments and land laws from the perspective of the soil and stones. Me? I have to say I prefer dealing with the humans and fairies, if only because there's less of a language barrier. I'm not great at a language that works through vibration alone, and you don't want to ask it to repeat itself too often in case you set off a landslide.

And let's not even get started on what happens when an enchanted _castle_ starts pressing charges for neglect…


	2. Flicking Fins and Waving Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I always wonder what price the Little Mermaid actually paid to get her legs. Not the price she paid in the end - though I wonder at the truth of that, there are so many versions - but what she signed away. Because it wasn't her voice, not the way we mean it when we say she exchanged her song for the soles of her feet.
> 
> Mermaids can't talk, you see.

I always wonder what price the Little Mermaid actually paid to get her legs. Not the price she paid in the end - though I wonder at the truth of that, there are so many versions - but what she signed away. Because it wasn't her voice, not the way we mean it when we say she exchanged her song for the soles of her feet.

Mermaids can't talk, you see.

Not because on land you can't hear it, or because they all have to give up words for legs in order to leave the sea. But because they don't have that kind of language. They certainly make sounds, a little like dolphins or whales, but that's not their whole language, and their vocal range wouldn't be the same as a human's _anyway._

Mermaids talk with everything - a few noises, yes, but mostly their fins, their posture, quick gestures with their hands. It took me a long time to learn. People had been trying to teach mermaids to speak for decades, with little success. Sometimes they could teach a mermaid a set of sounds that were like words, but it was always clear that it wasn't _speech_. There was no understanding involved, it was just repeating noises. Still a kind of communication, I guess, but you couldn't exactly have a gripping conversation.

I'm sure I'm not the first to wonder if it works the other way around, but I haven't heard of anyone who's done it. But if they got the amount of stick I did for trying, I can't blame them for keeping quiet.

It was the simple gestures I noticed first, the way the mother mermaid would make this one flicking movement with her left hand, flaring the fingers so the web between them stretched out, whenever she was shooing her boisterous children away. It was a little like that 'hey look at my fancy ring' photo shoot pose. Lazing on the jetty, I watched and I wondered, and on the next rainy day when I still had to get out of the house because if not I was going to get in a row with my brother due to being cooped up, I dragged my reluctant feet to the library.

People had noticed that kind of movement before, which I guess isn't a surprise. There were thick, dry books on mermaid communication. Nothing about us trying it in reverse, though that could be my library skills. I've never been the keenest reader and researcher. Maybe there's a whole literature out there about it, but then I guess I'm glad I didn't see it. Even if someone's achieved it before, accomplishing something you thought was new is still an achievement, surely?

My dislike of research aside, i was glad for the books, because it would've taken decades to collect even the small handful of basic gestures that we seemed to already have a meaning behind. The hand gesture I'd seen was a warning, a sort of 'leave me be'. There was a soft circular movement in front of the heart that seemed to be some kind of appeasement.

That's the first one I used myself, when I managed to have been not a threat for long enough that one of the younger mermaids loitered nearby while I was swimming, watching me suspiciously. She stared with wide eyes, then swam away as fast as her tail could take her. I later figured out that I was actually giving permission to swim in my territory - heart's water, I think, is the best translation I've come up with - rather than anything close to 'I mean no harm'. But she was mostly just shocked that I was saying _anything_, really, and the idea of me taking over her family's territory was laughable. So far as they were concerned, I could scarcely swim - how exactly would I run them out of their own waters?

Still, permission to swim in my territory was about the only thing I said for a week, until she stopped swimming away in confusion. Then one day, she made the same sign back at me, eyes fixed on me. Her fins were flicking - in out in out. I didn't know it then, but when I looked it up later, that was a sign of caution, of nerves. She was scared, wary, but still trying to communicate with me.

The fins proved to be a challenge for me, when I finally figured out how important they were in communication. The flicking gesture that I'd seen as 'shoo'? If your fins were closed and relaxed, it was friendly, more 'let me be now, go on'. If they were fanned, on display, it was something fiercer - 'get away'. Seeing as I'm human, there's some obvious challenges in taking part in a type of speech that requires gestures with limbs I simply don't possess. Webbed hands were easy enough to fix up, stretchy material sewn painstakingly between the fingers of gloves, but the fins were a pain.

Really, it's not surprising that people laughed at me. Someone wandering around and trying to rig up movable fins for themselves to use while treading water in scuba gear is pretty entertaining. The best I could figure out to start with was a kind of fan, made out of bits of cello-pane and a wooden frame, which I could open or close and wave around at my side in a crude imitation. It made anything that needed two hands to sign impossible, but it was a start.

Once I'd managed to communicate enough to be certain it wasn't just my imagination, I got my brother to help me figure out a different system. Now I have two fans attached to a kind of belt, so they hang at my hips, in roughly the right place for the main fins. I can open and close them and they'll stay put. We managed to rig them up so they click between different positions, so I can angle them too - pressed close, or outstretched, flat on or slightly twisted. It takes time to do, though I'm getting quicker.

The mermaids are smart enough to understand what I'm doing, which helps. They speak slowly so that I have time to follow the movements, and give me time to make the gestures and fumble with my raggedy fins. When I can, I use one hand gestures and mess with just one of the fins. I doubt I'm ever going to be something like fluent, but that's okay. It's a foreign language, after all, and I'm teaching myself, gesture by gesture.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it really was her voice the Little Mermaid offered up in the bargain. She gave up her flicking fins and the webbing on her hands, the gestures and postures that meant you could have a whole conversation without a sound, in minuscule motions. In exchange, she got legs and human vocal chords, and a whole language that bore no resemblance to hers.

I wonder if she ever taught herself human speech, stumbling and scowling over strange sounds as she tried to communicate, hands waving in words no-one around her could understand. I wonder if anyone bothered trying to learn.


	3. Russet Fur

In my defence, no-one ever _told_ me why I wasn't supposed to go visit grandma. Sure, there were the usual 'path through the woods' risks, but that wasn't a real _reason,_ not when we'd all played in the woods for years. They didn't even give me a bogus explanation, just forbade it.

At a certain age, being forbidden something outright with no reason becomes a motivation all on its own. I knew grandma was sickly - she always had been - and it was quite a regular occurrence for one of my parents or older siblings to toddle off with a basket of goodies to bring her some comfort.

Very regular. Monthly, in fact, though I'd never really noticed that. Partly because I was a bit unobservant, and partly because it wasn't like that was the _only_ time someone went to visit her.

So one day I woke up early, so early that it was actually still nighttime, and couldn't sleep. I was feeling rebellious - I was a teenager, alright? - but in that _I want to prove I'm responsible_ way, rather than _shout and tear things up _way. And getting a sneaky cookie from the kitchen to tide me over until breakfast, a good few hours away yet, I saw the basket all ready for mother's trip to grandma's later that day.

Well, I decided to save mum the walk.

It was a pleasant night, and I wasn't scared of anything in the local woods. I _should_ have been, but I wasn't. And I loved grandma, but never really got to see her without the rest of the family around, and it struck me that if I went along myself, I'd kill several birds with one stone. I'd be helping out, and being all grown up, which was _sure_ to impress my parents.

I'd also be away from home all morning, which would make a change. And I'd get grandma to myself for a while.

So off I went, full of good intentions and with laughable naivete. I did think to leave a note, and I even threw on my thickest cloak, a beautiful red woollen thing that had been a birthday gift from grandma herself.

It did occur to me when I was about twenty minutes into the woods that I maybe should have waited until dawn, at least, but I shook the thought off. My cloak was warm, and there was a full moon in the clear skies. Besides, it was an easy enough path.

Even so, I jumped when an owl swooped silently through my line of sight, heart pounding. I didn't believe in ghosts, but for a moment, I'd been spooked. I had to force myself to keep going, reminding myself shakily that of course there were going to be night time creatures about. A wolf howled, somewhere in the distance, and despite telling myself that _I wasn't scared at all_, I picked up the pace a little.

Foolishly, it wasn't until I arrived at the clearing grandma lived in and saw that there were no candles burning that it occurred to me that she wouldn't be awake. Of course. Because she wouldn't be expecting her middle grandkid to turn up in the early hours of the morning to say hi.

I realised at this point that perhaps I hadn't been so grown up and helpful as all that, but it was too late. I was there, and I sure wasn't going to turn tail and walk home again - by the time I made it back, it _would_ be a reasonable time to set out, not to mention it would be plain embarrassing having to explain to my parents, and my siblings would mock me for the rest of time.

I also wasn't going to sit around until a sensible time, because even with a cloak it was cold out and I'd freeze. A wolf howled again, sounding worryingly closer than before, and that cemented the deal. I was going inside, _now_. The front door was so warped that poor grandma would think I was breaking in if I tried to open it quietly, so I went round the corner of the cottage, already loosening my cloak ready to hang it up once I was in her cozy kitchen.

The wolf was sniffing around the back door.

Its head snapped up as I walked into view, and my heart froze as I stopped dead.

Okay, not literally, but you know what I mean.

It wasn't a normal wolf, too large, it's fur a russet streaked with silver, and it's eyes…oh gods, its eyes were human. That freaked me out the most. Regular wolf? Scary, but…normal. Deadly, sure, but at least it was…just an animal. This?

This was some kind of monster.

I didn't run. Perhaps that was another foolish decision, but I figured there was no point. A wolf could outrun me. This thing wouldn't even have to break into a trot to cross the clearing to me in record time.

The basket dropped from fingers numb with fear, and the silent tension snapped. The wolf leapt, and I stumbled back, fumbling mindlessly with my cloak. Somehow I got the material between me and the wolf, as though that would stop those teeth, screaming my lungs out.  
"GRANDMA!"

Quite what I thought my dear old granny was going to _do_, I've never been certain, but hey. It's not the kind of situation that lends itself to reasoned responses.

What actually _happened_ was that I went down with a wolf landing on me, and landed with my grandma lying on my stomach. She blinked short-sightedly at me, then down at the cloak.  
"Oh, _bother._ Look, I've put some terrible rips in it."

So…yeah. That's how I found out my grandma has this unfortunate tendency of turning into a wolf every month when the full moon rises…and also that if you go into the woods with a werewolf's clothes and call to them, they'll turn back into a human.

My parents did at least let me go to grandma's alone after that -

\- but only once I'd been grounded for a month.


End file.
